


A Brief History of Classification Systems in the Ingram Library

by BlossomTime



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Codes & Ciphers, Dewey Decimal Classification, F/M, Homophobia, Libraries, Library of Congress Classification, M/M, Readers Advisory, Sad Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 08:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7526197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlossomTime/pseuds/BlossomTime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harold must change the library to serve his purposes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brief History of Classification Systems in the Ingram Library

S.R. Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science:

  1. Books are for use. 
  2. Every reader their book. 
  3. Every book its reader. 
  4. Save the time of the reader. 
  5. The library is a growing organism. 



The library building was purchased by insurance executive Nathan Ingram after the branch closure. All collections are transferred to other New York Public Library locations. Shelving and furniture remain on site, bought at surplus prices. Nathan Ingram begins impulsively buying deaccessioned books from library sales. 

Eventually he buys them by the pallet-load. 

Books from Nathan Ingram's personal collection are moved from his home and from storage units in upstate New York. The collection is cataloged, classified in Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and entered into open source library catalog software by a freelance cataloger. No circulation module is installed. The cataloger works on site and tells her friends how cool it is to have an unlimited tab at Demco. The books are shelved by a small group of temp workers. The collection is given a name: The Ingram Library. 

After the death of Nathan Ingram, management of the library is taken on by Harold Finch. His collection of books is added to the shelves, uncataloged. 

Messages from The Machine no longer arrive at the library in plain text. Social Security numbers are now encoded as fragments of a book's title and author, books in the Ingram Library collection. They indicate the first three digits of each book's DDC number. Three books equal one person, a simple and elegant cipher. 

Early messages from The Machine are garbled and incomplete. Harold Finch investigates. The problem originates in the initial three digits of the irrelevant target's Social Security Number. The majority of numbers in the New York City area were originally issued in New York state. Each begins with the numbers 050 through 134. There are gaps in the collection within these classification numbers. 

Collection development begins in the areas of the history of periodical literature, antiquarian book collecting, philosophy, witchcraft, and parapsychology. Selection and purchasing is outsourced to a vendor, the ironically-named Ingram Library Services, and the books are purchased with cataloging, classification, and processing completed prior to delivery. Their dust jackets are quite nice. 

Message quality improves, but inaccuracies persist. Harold Finch again investigates. The problem is numbers used in SSNs but not in DDC. Arbitrarily designating books with unused classification numbers is the obvious solution, but it's a kluge and it seems inelegant to Harold. 

The philosophical problems of making two meaning-laden numbering systems mesh together smoothly, like gear teeth, preys on his mind. Both systems have been forced to encompass more than their original designers intended. 

Social Security Numbers had only been meant to facilitate a system of government old age payments, a system that initially didn't even include domestic or farm workers. Numbers weren't applied to people not yet old enough to work until the 1980s. Their use as unique identifiers then spread like an algal bloom though an ecosystem tragically out of balance. They were applied to medical records, credit scores, even things as trivial as (for a time) video rentals. That misuse formed the central spine in The Machine, enabling data from a multitude of realms to come together, to be applied to a single person. Numbers, at least until 2011, were linked to the state of issue and the prefixes clustered at the low end of the scale-- all of the eastern seaboard states together only cover 001 to 267. This means that, in a sort of poetic tragedy, art, literature, and history are unmoored from human lives. It seems appropriate that New York should have a solid hold on journalism and publishing. Philosophy seems plausible. Witchcraft, however, seems like a stretch. 

Investigating the Dewey Decimal Classification takes Harold down a baffling research hole. His previous knowledge had begun and ended with Ms. Albright's instruction to his visiting 4th grade class: each number was an idea, each idea had its home on the shelf. She was the first Ms. he had ever met, something that had given her an air of transgression in a small farming community. That impression was only solidified by the books he later discovered in the 300s: books of thoughtful and joyous liberation that contradicted his classmates' hushed and knowing tales of the disgusting and sad lives of "fags." He had loved Ms. Albright for this secret lifeline, remaining for many years convinced that these books had been for him alone. 

When he got his own social security number (for weekend shifts at the pizza parlor, filling endless pitchers of Cokes, he came home reeking of the orange pizza grease that seemed to get on everything) he had tried to find it at the library. He had found himself among books on ancient Greek and Latin. He was disappointed to not find something more significant to him, something that would feel like the beginning of a fantasy novel where the hero discovers he is special and out of place. 

Now he found that Ms. Albright's numbers grew from a very flawed human system that seemed to groan under the weight of changing philosophies. Religion's numbers (not an area he had spent much time in, back home) was horrifyingly unbalanced: 200-289 were Christianity. 290-299 held every other religion. Numbers were skipped, numbers were added, classifications were moved, a lot of shuffling had occurred to fit computers into the section on knowledge. Facets, however, turned out to be delightful: adding geography, language, or format information with the addition of a string of digits to the existing classification. 

He dipped into Library of Congress Classification and found similar problems without the elegance of the three digits beginning each book's classification-- LCC numbers ranged from one to four digits after a two-letter code. 

In books on the limitations and possibilities of classification he discovered the writing of radical catalogers (who knew there were such people?) who tried to make libraries reflect the lives and information needs of all everyone, even the women and queers and minorities shelved together in the 300s. They didn't seek to destroy but to make changes for the better within elegant informational systems. He was so touched by this that he found he required a tea break. 

DDC's ubiquity was going to pose a problem. How difficult would it be for someone who heard the message to decode it? He tested a few messages, combining a title keyword and author keyword search in WorldCat. Sure enough, the books popped up and the classification data was there. He could make a script to retrieve the information in a matter of moments, with no physical access to his library needed. Limiting physical access was his best low-tech solution. His belief in the security of any database, his own library catalog included, had long since faded. The Machine was built on millions upon millions of private databases, most purchased legally, leased, or obtained by merger. The trade datasets was its own economy. Cryptography, too, had faded in his estimation, knowing the kind of computing power The Machine's keepers were willing to throw at the smallest obstacle. Trivial, really, compared to the hideous overreach they had used to stop Nathan. 

He felt stuck and began to wander the stacks. Perhaps that could pull him out of this rut. There was a sort of trick to it: a kind of unfocused thought, skimming his eyes across the spines as he walked by, distracting his brain with input that looked meaningful but didn't add up to much. He came across a rolling stool and sat, breathing in cool library air. Right at his eye line was a copy of _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ That book had seemed to crystalize the essence of his group of friends in grad school. They were all smartasses, curious about the world, always questioning the established way of doing things, teaching themselves to pick locks, pulling elaborate pranks, just like Feynman. They had all privately thought of themselves as unrecognized geniuses. 

There were other parallels to Feynman. One by one they had vanished into their own Manhattan Projects, their published work drying into nothing as it became classified, moving to boring little towns near centers of military research. If crypto was a munition, AI was an army. Each fooled themselves by imagining they served pure science or the cause of freedom. They served an industry that would chain them to endless production, endless escalation, long after the present enemy was gone. 

He felt more like Oppenheimer now, still as brilliant but scarred by knowledge of what he'd unleashed, too aware of the people he'd hurt, how utterly complicit he was in turning his work into a tool of violence and control. 

He pulled the book off the shelf, stood, and walked over to a still-empty run of shelves. He put it on a shelf he mentally labelled "grad school." To that shelf he added the books from the seminar class on ethics in computing, a class that had started a weeks-long fight with Nathan. He started a shelf for high school ( _Dungeon Master's Guide_ , Monty Python scripts, homebrew computing zines, puzzle books by Martin Gardner), then college ( _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ ; bound issues of _2600_ ; books on Zen philosophy; every book he'd devoured in English Lit). He started a shelf of books he read because his first college girlfriend had loved them ( _The Little Prince, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Prophet_ ), then his first ever boyfriend (Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Gore Vidal). Then a shelf of the books he had shipped home when his dad moved to assisted living. It was only a tiny fraction of what his dad had crammed into the bookshelf in the living room, mostly mystery novels he had bought at garage sales. Each book had a pencilled check mark inside the front cover so his dad could tell if he'd read it and not end up reading it again and again. He'd left behind the grease-stained truck and tractor manuals, his grandfather's collection of pamphlets from the Rosicrucians, a Bisquick cookbook that they'd only ever used for pancakes, old National Geographics, a guide to tracking wild animals, and a _Hints from Heloise_ that came free with a year's home delivery of the paper. His own high school collection of SF magazines and books come next, books with feather-soft edges from so many readings: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison. Then books on hobbies he'd taken up when he had more money than he knew what to do with: flying, first editions, Michelin guides with fanned-out pages and pen marks next to three star restaurants he had enjoyed, and auction catalogs. The shelves fill faster as each book sparks memories of more. 

Grace's shelf requires moving the shelf above it so the oversized art books will fit, the books he had bought to learn everything he could about the artists she loved. She listened to audiobooks while she painted and he would read them between dates, trying to keep up with her, so they could talk about them. Eventually she insisted that he weigh in on what they read next. Literary fiction, SF, engrossing memoirs, nonfiction that seemed to peel back the layers of the world they lived in, all of it experienced together: Sherman Alexie, Connie Willis, Jon Ronson, Sarah Vowell, Mary Roach, Douglas Coupland. It was intoxicating. He wished he knew what she was listening to right now. Each book he placed on her shelf sharpened the pain in his chest. He had to take a break when he could no longer see through his tears. He is not the first person to cry on the library staff room's couch. 

The whole project takes about a week and a half and fills two aisles. His hands are filthy with dust and his arms ache every night. His whole life is there: his passions, brief enthusiasms, everyone he knew and everyone he'd lost. He starts by creating two letter codes: HS for high school, MI for MIT. Then he distributes three-number strings, making sure every number shows up at least once, putting them on post-its. He uses the label printer to make it look professional. 

It would never be cataloged, the books needn't even be in order. He knows them so well he can pick them out by size and color. The whole system is in his head: the numbers are meaningless codes to be retrieved with meaningful memories. He shows it all to The Machine by walking past with a wifi enabled camera. 

It is an unbreakable cipher between them.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story I wrote because I was annoyed when John describes the library's classification as Dewey when it is _clearly not_ , plus lots of queer librarian nerdery and feels.


End file.
